Essay
Imagine the thrill. A letter drops through a mail slot, the phone rings, or your email pings. The message contains a beautiful proposition. Atlanta’s High Museum will give you a not unsubstantial amount of money. In return, you agree to make photographs in the South. Otherwise, you can do whatever you want, knowing that your »
Essay
Confronted with another year of the pandemic–another year of heartbreak, isolation, and resolve–we turned to imagination. We launched the year with an issue on the Imaginary South, guest edited by the esteemed writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson. “There are Souths that are only imaginary because most dominant stories about the region do not acknowledge they »
Essay
The capillaries that connect your heart to your lungs are both airstreams and blood flow. Doctors call them periarterial. In the maze of small blood vessels that process oxygen no one knows where your heart ends and your lungs begin. Maybe there is no end to your heartbeat, your breathing. Even when the decade starts »
Essay
In 1975, Joan Little was on tour. Media covering the story of her legal case—a first-degree murder charge, her ultimate acquittal, and her subsequent retreat from public life—tended to frame her life as a political and social cause. Many groups took up her case as a landmark gesture toward prison abolition, antirape activism, and civil rights »
Essay
This is a review of “The Dirty South” at the VMFA where it originated and hung until September 6, 2021. The show is now on view at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, through February 6, 2022, and images in this feature are courtesy of that museum. Later, it will travel to Crystal Bridges Museum of »
Poetry
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at two different animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press »
Memoir
Raised in the latter days of the mannered South, I was schooled daily, hourly—minutely—on the proper ways to speak, dress, eat, move, and sit. My parents imparted these lessons wherever we happened to be, whether at home, out in public, or at their higher-end antiques shop in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They told me what »
Resources
What we put here will override the programmatic description
Poetry
It is an honor and a pleasure to be welcoming remarkable poet and visionary Destiny Hemphill as Poetry Editor alongside me here at Southern Cultures. Too often poetry journals, or even the small space poetry takes up in larger magazines, become vacuums that amplify the taste of one person. We’ve worked hard to make sure »
Memoir
“While I struggle, I will continue to study and learn about the struggles of others.” After spending almost thirty-three years in a Mississippi prison, on a hot summer day in 2020, I was contacted and invited to be a host of a radical study group. What intrigued me about this program was that it was facilitated »
Essay
Thirty years ago, Women With A Vision (WWAV) was just an idea, thought up by a collective of Black women on a front porch in New Orleans, Louisiana. The year was 1989, and the so-called War on Drugs had already been raging for nearly two decades. Black women were increasingly being demonized as “welfare queens” »
Memoir
What societal interest is served by keeping prisoners illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? Much has been written and much has been said about life in prison. Some write of the glaring incidents of violence that occur, certain that such subjects will grab the attention of the reader. Others play down the violence, »